June 2017

CONFIRMED: Google will start blocking annoying ads on Chrome

Google’s Head of Ads and Commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy confirmed reports that Chrome will block ads that don’t meet Google’s ad standards, starting in early 2018.

He said ‘’ we believe ads should be better. That’s why we joined the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving online ads.

Google will introduce a tool, the Ad Experience Report, to help publishers understand how the Better Ads Standards apply to their own website. It provides screenshots and videos of annoying ad experiences that the Google system detects.

If publisher’s site does not fit the standards, Google will send a warning 30 days before ad blocking begins. This gives the publisher time to fix the issues and resubmit their sites for review within that time frame to avoid having their ads blocked on Chrome.

In-market and custom audiences targeting introduced by Bing Ads

In-Market Audiences [US advertisers only] and Custom Audiences Targeting [Global] are new features being released by Bing via a pilot program. These new features are designed to help advertisers reach their ideal customers.

In-Market Audience: These are curated lists of individuals found to have purchase intent for a particular category of products or services. Purchase intent is determined based on user signals across Bing, MSN, and other Microsoft Services.

Bing’s example; ‘’ Say you’re a travel site looking to target searchers who are ready to book a summer vacation. Bing Ads looks for people who are clicking on ads related to hotels and flights, searching for relevant vacation terms, or checking out hotel reviews, for example, and predicts whether these users are ready to buy. Users identified as likely to purchase are included in the Travel & Tourism/Accommodations In-Market Audience, which you can associate to your ads. Since you know these people are more likely to book a vacation, you could increase your bid, for example, to help you capture this valuable audience.’’

Bing Ads provides the In-Market audience lists, so advertisers don’t have to curate them on their own. Simply assign a list to an ad group and you’re ready to go. In order to get access to this feature, you must reach out to your Bing Ads account team.

Custom Audiences: These are remarketing lists generated from your own data. After connecting your data platform Manger into Bing’s new Custom Audiences feature, you can import Custom Audiences segments into Bing Ads for search remarketing. Once you’ve imported your Custom Audiences segments into Bing Ads, you can then target audiences that you have built using your own customer data.

In order to get access to this feature, you must be using Adobe Audience Manager as your data platform manager. You must also reach out to your Bing Ads accounts team to participate in the pilots for this program.

Advertisers can opt out of displaying ads on desktop

In an effort to further support mobile-only campaigns, advertisers can now completely opt out of displaying ads on Desktop. The new range for desktop is now in-line with the rest of devices at -100% to +900%.

This new feature will be available through all endpoints: Bing Ads Web Interface, Bing Ads Editor, and Bing Ads API.

This new feature will be rolled out globally in the coming weeks.

Google AdWords smart bidding sets the ideal bid

Google is introducing Maximise Conversions, a new technology that uses smart bidding to automatically set the right bid for each auction, so you can get the maximum amount of conversions that your daily budget allows.

Google’s example; ‘’if you’re a clothing retailer trying to quickly sell last season’s styles, Maximize Conversions will help you get the most number of sales from your existing budget by factoring signals like remarketing lists, time of day, browser and operating system into bids. Smart Bidding uses Google’s machine learning technology to optimize for conversions across every ad auction—also known as “auction-time bidding”.

Bing visual search lets you search specific objects within images

Introducing Bing Visual Search, a new tool that lets users search for specific items within a larger image.

An example by Bing; let’s say you are looking for kitchen decoration inspiration, and an image attracted your attention. You click on a thumbnail result to get to the ‘Detail View’. You really like the overall décor, but you are particularly interested in that nice-looking chandelier. Would it be possible to see where you can get one just like that? With Bing Visual Search, now you can!

In the Detail View, you will now see a magnifying glass symbol in the top left of the image. It is called the visual search button.

Clicking the visual search button displays a visual search box on the image. You can click and drag this box to adjust it to cover just the object of your interest. You can also simply draw a box around the chandelier if that’s more convenient.

Every time you adjust the visual search box, Bing instantly runs a visual search using the selected portion of the image as the query.

We realize that many Bing image search users may be shopping for items they see in the image or a similar product. We automatically detect the shopping intent and, in addition to regular image search, we also run a product search to find matching products:

Now you can simply click on the chandelier that is right for you, pick the best merchant on the detail page and finalize your purchase!

If you’re not in a shopping mood after all, you can still click on “Related Images” to continue exploration of similar images. We are continuously working to detect more intents and bring the best information to the results to satisfy your search needs.

After you’ve found the perfect chandelier options for your project, it’s easy to conduct a visual search for other items. For example, in our example image you can select that beautiful bowl and find a similar one for your kitchen. You can search for any object you see in the image.

Bing says its new visual search tool will work with existing internet images as well as new, user-taken photos.

No Google featured snippets analytics will come to Search Console

According to Google’s Trends Analyst, Gary IIIyes, the company is not actively working on a tool within Search Console for publishers to get analytics about their featured snippets.

He did say they have a solution to show publishers this data. “We have something that we think would answer those questions, but we cannot release it,” Illyes said.

They cannot release it because the people who make the decisions at Google, Illyes’ bosses, he said, won’t allow them to release it. “Some people don’t want to see this feature this launched for various [reasons].”

What he suggested is that webmasters should communicate to Google what you would do with that data so he can bring that sales pitch back to his bosses. They need to find a use case where it would help publishers make better content.

Google job listings search is now available to all job search sites and developers

Google announced that they are now opening up job listings within Google Search to all developers and site owners.

Submit a sitemap (or an RSS or Atom feed) with a <lastmod> date for each listing.

If you have more than 100,000 job postings or more than 10,000 changes per day, you can express interest to use the High Change Rate feature.

If you already publish your job openings on another site like LinkedIn, Monster, Direct Employers, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor, and Facebook, they are eligible to appear in the feature as well.

Google feels this feature offers many benefits to employers or site owners with job content. These include:

Prominent place in Search results: your postings are eligible to be displayed in the in the new job search feature on Google, featuring your logo, reviews, ratings, and job details.

More, motivated applicants: job seekers can filter by various criteria like location or job title, meaning you’re more likely to get applicants who are looking exactly for that job.

Increased chances of discovery and conversion: job seekers will have a new avenue to interact with your postings and click through to your site.

Google introduces new suggested video clips

Google is rolling out ‘suggested clips’. These are videos featured at the tops of the results that are queued to start at exactly the part of the video that best answers the question.

To see this in action, simply search for ‘How to (insert action here) YouTube and it will retrieve the clip that best answers that question.

Google has officially rolled out a new tab-based local panel

Google has confirmed that they have fully rolled out a new user experience for local panel in the mobile search results. This comes after a month of testing it.

With this feature, users can now quickly toggle between the local business’s overview details and the reviews for that business.

Google rolls out local highlight icons and price labels for hotel results

Google has confirmed that they are rolling out two new local search features:

Highlight icons in the local search listings: these icons show in a local panel that represent what amenities the local business has. Items might include fast service, healthy options, etc.

Price labels in the hotel search results: With this feature, you can quickly see on the map the price of the hotels in the specific area you’re searching for.

Google releases a website builder for small businesses

Google has released a single-page website builder designed for small businesses. The new tool, simply called ‘’Website’’ is free and promises to allow smaller businesses to create and edit websites in minutes, either on desktop or mobile.

According to Google, 60% of small businesses worldwide don’t have their own website. Website is an extension of Google My Business, which means you will need to have a completely filled out Googly My Business Account in order to make use of this tool. Google will automatically pull the information from your Googly My Business listing to create the website, which can then be customised with themes, photos, and text.

Google Posts feature moves to Google My Business

Google has moved the location of Google Posts to Google My Business and the company hopes to expand Posts to more businesses and organisations. Small businesses that are in the Google Posts program can still make use of the service, but the location of that feature has moved to within the Google My Business area.

*Google Posts is a feature that allows people and businesses to create content directly on Google which appears highly ranked in Google search results for their name.

Facebook brings value metrics to campaigns to help advertisers target the best customers

To make advertising on the platform even better for businesses, Facebook has launched two new features;

Value optimisation targeting: This new targeting is made possible by the Facebook pixel and the purchase values that are sent back to Facebook. Using this data, Facebook will estimate just how much a person may spend with you over a seven-day period and this new targeting will adjust your bid automatically to cater to this more valuable audience.

Value-based lookalike audiences: This new feature will try to target users who are similar to your best customers. With value-based lookalikes, advertisers can view a value column to their customer lists that will then be used as a weighted signal when targeting.

These upgrades can be found within your Ads Manager or Business Manager Accounts.

Instagram debuts tools for celebrities and publishers to label sponsored posts and Stories

Instagram creators will now be able to attach ‘Paid partnership with’ tags to their sponsored posts to keep clear of regulators. This photo-sharing platform is a hot spot for brands to pay celebrities and publishers to promote certain products/ services and piggyback their organic audiences.

However, if a post is not mentioned as being sponsored or paid for, influencers and celebrities can come into serious trouble for breaking advertising guidelines.

A complaint against Irish blogger, Grace Mongey (aka Faces by Grace) was made to the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland (ASAI) for not clearly labelling a sponsored post. Mongey shared a series of snaps promoting Miss Fit Skinny Tea and a complaint was made to the organisation that it was not clearly marked as sponsored with the relevant hashtag. The most used hashtags to notify followers of a paid-for post are #ad or #sp.

This new move by Instagram ensures there is a set standard to tell viewers when something is sponsored.

The evolution of content marketing: what the 1900s can teach you

In this post, contributor Brad Smith takes you through the history of content marketing. From early adaptors like John Deere (lifestyle magazine for farmers, The Furrow) to today’s big players like Coca-Cola (digital platform, Coca-Cola journey), it’s a must read for all content marketers.

How to guest blog without making Google angry

In this post, contributor Tony Wright outlines 4 steps to effective guest blogging that will make Google happy.

9 blogging tools that will make your job easier

Content marketing institute outlines 9 tools that will help you do more, know more, and understand more to boost your blog performance without spending hours learning new things. You’ll find tools like PlagiarismCheck.org (great for checking if the content already exists on the web), Kparser (a handy FREE keyword research tool), DrumUp (a great tool to push your content into social media feeds without being repetitive) and so much more.

The role of traditional public relations in SEO

In this post, columnist Jeremy Knauff and PR expert Cheryl Snapp Conner share their insight on how to achieve success in this critical area. Read the full post here.

The Contently interview: Fat Joe on building a brand and marketing rap

In this post, Contently catch up with rapper Fat Joe (real name Joseph Cartagena) and chat about his latest venture: a sneaker store in upper Manhattan. Read the full interview here.

Why ‘good’ isn’t good enough in Google Shopping

Columnist Andreas Reiffen looks at growth data for product listing ads and explains why even an 89% growth in revenue year over year may not be enough to outpace your competitors. Read the full post here.

Learn Inbound

When: Wednesday, July 19 2017 at 6:00pm

Where: The Academy, Dublin

Details: Network with some of the brightest minds in the Inbound Marketing Industry and learn about the latest tools, tactics and strategies in content marketing, SEO and more.

Amplify Digital Marketing Conference

When: Thursday & Friday, July 27 & 28 2017 from 09:00am to 6:00pm

Where: Clayton Hotel Silver Springs, Cork

Details: A diverse mix of home-grown talent, international giants, and rising stars of the marketing world take to the stage over two days. At its core, Amplify aims to equip attendees with knowledge and skills that can be immediately implemented in their own company or business.

Established in 2002, we're a specialist digital agency with a simple formula: seasoned experts on every account and a commitment to delivering on our promises. We’ve stuck with the formula for more than 15 years – because it works!